close
Skip to content
View AmandaSilver's full-sized avatar

Block or report AmandaSilver

Block user

Prevent this user from interacting with your repositories and sending you notifications. Learn more about blocking users.

You must be logged in to block users.

Maximum 250 characters. Please don’t include any personal information such as legal names or email addresses. Markdown is supported. This note will only be visible to you.
Report abuse

Contact GitHub support about this user’s behavior. Learn more about reporting abuse.

Report abuse
AmandaSilver/README.md

Hello World!

I build developer tools and platforms at Microsoft. I now lead Product for M365 Core and Work IQ — the infrastructure that keeps Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams running at enterprise scale, and the intelligence layer where agents reason over organizational knowledge within enterprise access controls. I sat down at my dad's IBM when I was seven years old and ran donkey.bas. I've been hooked on what software can do for people ever since.

My personal career mission: Empower every builder to shape the world they want to see.


What I believe

I've always loved having developers as my customers — they're sharp, passionate, and never shy about giving feedback. Here's what's stuck with me:

  • People, not personas — build for real humans, not abstractions
  • Product truth — no fluff, no hype. Developers smell marketing a mile away
  • Ship to learn — every release is a compass, not a monument
  • Fast feedback cycles — great tools get out of the way and let you stay in flow
  • Take your work seriously, never yourself

What I've worked on

I've been incredibly lucky to work on technologies like Visual Studio, VS Code, .NET, TypeScript, Playwright, Azure DevOps, GitHub Codespaces, our Azure app platform, and most recently GitHub Copilot — from the lens of how they surfaced in VS Code, Visual Studio, and the programming languages our products support.

.NET — Where it all started: language design, compiler work, and more specs than I can count.

LINQ — Part of the design team with Paul Vick, Erik Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg, Pablo Castro and others that took Language Integrated Query from an exploration to the basis of how to support XML, Data, and schema natively in .NET.

TypeScript — Shepherded it from inception through launch through 2025.

Visual Studio — Managed teams across the IDE from VS 2005 through VS 2026, helping drive the tool through many major releases and the shift to cloud-connected development.

VS Code — Took on supporting the team post-launch and spent years shepherding its growth, managing the role it played alongside Visual Studio, and eventually supporting GitHub Copilot in the editor. During this period, my team also built what became GitHub Codespaces, starting with VS Code Remote as the foundation.

GitHub Copilot — Much of the core Copilot experience — especially in the early years — was surfaced through code editors like VS Code and Visual Studio. My team shepherded that integration from statement and token completion, through chat, to asynchronous coding agents. I was also responsible for how GitHub Copilot helped developers modernize their codebases, migrate to the cloud, and build apps for Azure and Foundry.

Microsoft Foundry — Led product for the Apps & Agents platform as Azure AI Foundry became Microsoft Foundry — a true enterprise platform for agentic AI. That chapter shipped the Microsoft Agent Framework (Python + .NET) unifying AutoGen and Semantic Kernel, Hosted Agents, the Foundry Control Plane with observability and evals, Foundry IQ for knowledge grounding, Foundry Memory for durable agent continuity, and Agent 365 governance — building the tools for creating agents.

Microsoft 365 Core & Work IQ — Where I am now. Leading product for the M365 Core platform — the infrastructure, services, and operational backbone that keeps Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and the rest of the suite running with the reliability and security customers depend on — and for Work IQ, the enterprise intelligence layer where agents reason over organizational knowledge and work signals. More and more, work will be people and agents solving problems together — and Work IQ is what lets agents draw on years of shared context, so they understand how your team actually works. The new Work IQ APIs go GA on June 16, 2026 — see Charles Lamanna's announcement for the full picture.

1ES — Led Microsoft's One Engineering System. I served as general manager from 2021 - 2026.

I hold a few patents in compiler and language technology — type inference, query comprehensions, XML literals, and more. This is all the kind of work that's most satisfying when it just disappears into the background and works.


📖 The Customer-Driven Playbook

I supported the team that wrote the The Customer-Driven Playbook (O'Reilly, 2017) — about building products by starting with customer hypotheses instead of assumptions. This reflects the foundations for what I think makes for a good product engineering team - understand your customer's aspirations deeply, they determine your goalposts.


A bit about me

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico — a place rich with history, scientific inquiry, artistic expression, and huge skies. These days I'm in Seattle with two kids who keep me honest.

For years I helped sponsor Microsoft MakeCode — making coding accessible to kids and beginners through block-based programming. Few things matter more than lowering the barrier for the next generation of builders.

If you want to know how I work and what I value, I keep a Human User Guide.


Say hi 👋

Or just open an issue — I read everything.

Pinned Loading

  1. react-todo-list react-todo-list Public

    Forked from burkeholland/react-todo-list

    JavaScript